The Problem Context of Goethe ’ S Biological Thought : the Problem of Biocausality
نویسندگان
چکیده
In 1802 Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus announced the birth of a new scientific discipline. He called it “biology,” the science whose aim was to determine the conditions and laws under which the different forms of life exist and their causes. Treviranus was not alone in forging the outlines of the new science of life. He was in fact consciously synthesizing discussions that had been going on for at least a decade in Germany involving such persons as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer, Heinrich Friedrich Link, and the von Humboldt brothers (Lenoir, 1981). But one of the most distinguished co-workers in this enterprise was the man whose scientific work we are celebrating in this volume; namely, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In the decade marking the centenary of Darwin’s death as well as the 150th anniversary of Goethe’s death, it is tempting to treat the work of Goethe and his cohorts as the rudimentary beginnings of a scientific discipline which would acquire its firm foundations some sixty years later in the work of Darwin. This was in fact the strategy followed by . Ernst Haeckel a century ago at a similar occasion when the sought to honor both men on the same program by casting Goethe as a precursor of the Darwinian theory of evolution (Haeckel, 1868, pp. 80-81). But such an ecumenical gesture would fail to appreciate the true significance of the movement initiated by Goethe, Treviranus and others. For the science of life they set out to found is not the one extrolled in textbooks today. In truth the works of Goethe and Darwin present us with two radically different conceptions of biological science, both capable in their own right of organizing the phenomena of life and serving as a basis for progressive empirical research. My aim in this paper is to discuss some of the special features of this grand conception of biological science that is found in Goethe’s writings.
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تاریخ انتشار 2002